It’s often significant when a politician breaks pattern, as Senate Majority Leader Thomas K. Norment, R-James City County, did earlier this week, voting to move a bill to increase the minimum wage to the full Senate.

A change of heart? It’d be a pretty dramatic one — Republicans have been pretty firm opponents of the half dozen or so minimum wage increase bills introduced every session for the past several years.

A game, like the vote in the 2017 session on sanctuary cities, designed to get then-Lt. Gov Ralph Northam to cast a tie breaker to kill the legislation, generating some soft-on-crime copy on his election campaign fliers that November. Northam won.

That doesn’t make too much sense, since this isn’t a gubernatorial election year.

But perhaps another pattern break offers a clue. Norment, unusually, last month blasted the Northern Virginia Chamber of Commerce when it endorsed state-Sen Jennifer Boysko, D-Herndon, in her special election race.

Boysko received the lowest grade of all 140 members of the General Assembly on the Virginia Chamber of Commerce’s annual report card on legislators’ positions on business issues, Norment wrote at the time.

“I am forced to wonder whether your organization has ceased to support or promote an agenda that encourages commerce,” Norment continued, before asking whether he should advise Senate Republicans that the Northern Virginia chamber “can no long be considered a pro-business advocacy organization?”

Could it possibly be that when the minimum wage bill reaches the Senate floor, Norment will point out that Boysko, like Northam, has favored a fairly fast track minimum wage increase? The bill the Senate Commerce and Labor committee approved, with Norment’s vote tilting it in favor, would boost Virginia’s minimum wage above California’s in 2021. Most of the other seven bills on the issue still enmeshed in the committee process proposed a slower pace to a lower wage level.

Might Norment just possibly be a bit sarcastic about business views on minimum wage increases, after noting the Northern Virginia chamber’s endorsement?

We’d be shocked, shocked to hear that.

But even setting aside the theater, one consequence will be the first real floor debate in years on a wage increase that’s probably been at the top of business groups’ lists of measures to oppose. And given the broad support for a minimum wage increase seen in the latest poll by Christopher Newport University’s Wason Center, that’s a debate that will be important in this election year.